Family
by schweinsty
Summary: James T. Kirk doesn't need a family. Not at all.


Family

James Tiberius Kirk does not need a family.

He has a name. It's a long name, a mouthful, and it cracks him up to hear Mr. Brody in Calculus II spit it out every other week or so, "JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK! PUT THAT STYLUS DOWN!" in the middle of a lecture with a very pronounced exclamation mark and his cheeks all red and puffed up and _indignant_.

The principal says it too, lots of times, except he's from Kentucky and he drawls it lazily, tapping his pen on his desk and looking as if he's dreaming of the tumbler of scotch he downs when he gets home every day. "James Tiberius Kirk. I wonder what your father would say."

His mother doesn't say it when she picks him up from the sheriff's office after the principal says one too many things one too many times and gets his jaw royally socked. She looks at him in silence and shakes her head. "Oh, James," she says, and her voice sounds disappointed, and sometimes James wonders if she wants to say "Oh, George" instead, and his stomach hurts.

His stepfathers say his name, though, standing tall and straight at the bottom of the staircase, banging on his bedroom door, shaking him and slapping him in the darkest corner of the barn where no one goes but them. "James Tiberius Kirk!" they say - scream sometimes, and James _hates_ it, hates it, because they say it like they have some connection to the name – as if they own it and command it when really, they're just angry little stand-ins who fall in love with Jim's mother and fall out of love with Jim, and it _grates_to hear them act as if the things they do to him have any bearing on what his name means.

James Tiberius Kirk, he says when they ask him who he is. James Tiberius Kirk, he says, rolls it off his tongue, when he's tired and bored and can't fall asleep fast enough and the heat of the Iowa summer feels itchy in his bedroom and the crickets are raising holy hell outside and his mother and his father's stand-in are arguing in the bedroom across the hall.

James Tiberius Kirk, he says, and sometimes he has no idea what it means.

James Tiberius Kirk does not need a family.

He has a reputation.

He's smart, he's brilliant, he has a pretty face, and he is very good at making other people feel very good. "You're an asshole," says this one Trill he meets in a psychology class whose name he knows but doesn't bother to remember once he's through with it. "You're the biggest jerk I've ever met," she tells him, but she spends a long and drunken weekend with him at her best friend's condo on the beach, and when they leave she's smiling.

"God, you're brilliant," his biomolecular physics professor tells him when he turns in his term paper. "Have you ever considered transferring to science?" She straightens her glasses and grins. Kirk waits until she has his paper graded and the grades submitted before he asks her out for a drink. "God, you're brilliant," she moans when he has her bent over on her desk and is sliding in and out of her and fingering her clit and yeah, he's good at this, really really good, and she's _touching_him, holding his hand flat on the desk under hers and scratching her fingernails across it and clutching it like it's something special, which he finds vaguely disturbing. "Oh, God, Kirk," she says.

"I heard he took out three of the security guys when they came to break up the fight," one of the freshman whispers when he passes by, and Jim thinks she's pretty cute, and she's got these bright wide eyes and these lips that look delicious, so he

_"Godammit, Jim, you're an idiot," Bones mumbles._

_Jim groans. His feet feel wet, and the sand under his shirt is getting colder. There are stars in the sky above, a full moon over the water, and the light from it breaks through the clouds and shines like a spotlight over the ripples in the ocean, here and there and off a mile in the distance, and the water is cold and freezing, and Jim wonders what it would be like if he just swam out there right now and the water and the moonlight closed over his head and lulled him off to somewhere beautiful where there was lots of silver light and the softly sounding whispers of a sleeping sea._

_"Get up," Bones says, and pulls him to his feet, and just like that the water and the wet and the cold calm comfort of the sand is gone, but Bones' hand is warm and rough around his chest, warm and rough and sure. "Let's get you sober."_

invites her to his bedroom after finals are over, and it turns out she has a friend, a cute little thing with lots of hair in lots of braids and hands that know just what to do and when to touch and teeth that find that spot beneath his ear lobe that feels really nice when someone bites it, and Jim spends a night with them and wakes up curled

_"You could have done better," Uhura says. Her face is tight with anger and ire and badly-restrained rage. "We could have done better."_

_"Aww, come on, Uhura," he says around the neck of the beer bottle his mouth is clamped onto. "We got first place, the judges loved us, the crowd loved us, our adoring fans – oh, yeah, they loved us – and we're going home with a big shiny trophy. What's-"_

_"But we could have done better – better than we did. We could have-" Uhura slaps the bottle from his hand and watches it break on the concrete sidewalk. The beer bubbles and gurgles and foams on down the sidewalk, and when Uhura stamps her foot in frustration, it splashes a little. "If you had come and practiced with me last night instead of spending it sleeping with some townie from the bar who thinks you're wonderful because you're wearing a uniform, we could have done it perfectly instead of scraping by with a last-second save, and we'd have been-"_

_"I did not," Jim enunciates very slowly, "sleep with a townie from the bar."_

_Uhura's fists unclench a bit._

_"I slept with two."_

_Uhura's mouth snaps shut, and she strides off and kicks the largest bit of the broken bottle hard against a lamp post._

_Jim watches it shatter and stares at the slowly-evaporating beer and doesn't get up to go grab another._

up between them with the freshman's head on his stomach and her cute friend's hand on his thigh. "Morning, ladies," he says, and smiles when they open their eyes. Yeah, he thinks, and moves out of the way and watches, I'm awesome.

James T. Kirk does not need a family.

He has a rank.

"Kirk," he tells the personal assistant in Admiral Archer's waiting room, the one who stares at him in his mud-stained pants and ripped-up shirt and sneers. "Captain Kirk," Jim says, and the man snaps to attention and ushers him in and offers him some coffee and some food and says, Oh, we can bring something for you to change into, too, sir, and Jim manages not to smirk very much.

"Call me Jim," he breathes at the blue chick in the green dress and the green chick in the blue bikini. He brings his hand up to greet them and very carefully lets the the sleeve roll down so that his captain's bars show on the end of it, bright bright white on yellow, and the pretty pretty ladies

_"I have brought a get-well present," Chekov says as he slides into the visitor's chair and takes a pack of cards out of his pocket. "Cards. To play bridge. It is a good game; it was invented by a shoemaker from Moscow."_

_They are halfway through the first game when Chekov purses his lips and screws up his eyes and taps his fingers on the edge of his cards and says "hmmmmm," in a very high-pitched tone._

_"I heard you today." He snaps his cards together and shuffles them nervously. "When the admiral was scolding you. It was not my business, but I heard it."_

_He takes one card and bends it gently with his index finger and his thumb. "I think she was right. It was not so captain-like to let him go. It was not so captain-like to bring the children on board. It was not so captain-like, the way you performed on this mission."_

_"But I think," Chekov says, and the card between his fingers flips out of them and lands on the blanket above Jim's belly button, "I would not respect you so much if you were always like a captain."_

smile and giggle and promise to show him a veeeery good time around the island, if he's free after lunch, and Jim smiles back and contacts the Enterprise to tell them he won't be back until tomorrow morning.

"Captain Kirk, Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. I'm here to negotiate a peace treaty on behalf of the Federation."

The Draxxans oooh and aaah and seem suitably impressed, and Jim receives an audience with the Draxxan High Council to present the Federations terms. It all goes very well and according to plan, and Jim is so happy with the result

_"I am the captain of the Enterprise," says Sulu as he steps between Jim and the man with the knife. "My lieutenant fell ill during the night. I am the one you want to question."_

_Fuck you, Jim wants to say, wants to scream. Fuck you, Sulu, I'm the captain, I'm the one they have to question, not you, not you not you not you not_

_"The hypo should keep him paralyzed for another hour," Bones whispers as they lead Sulu away. Uhura sighs, and she and Spock and Bones start talking, working on their escape plan, and their voices echo in the cell but aren't loud enough to drown out Sulu's screams when the villagers get angry because even though their truth serum works, Sulu doesn't have the information that they need, and Jim wants to scream at them because they're all stupid fucking idiots, yes, Uhura and Spock and Bones and especially Sulu, who grins when they drag him back in and gives Jim a weary thumbs-up that Jim can't even respond to._

_"That went better than I thought," Sulu says, and Jim wants to tell him that he's more important than some stupid information that Jim may or may not have floating in his head, but Sulu smiles and groans and shuts his eyes and falls asleep before Jim gets his voice back._

that he sends a coded message to Admiral Trisk and breaks out a bottle of wine for the bridge crew. "Captain's treat," he tells Bones and Spock as he passes the glasses (because someone broke the goblets) around, and they make toasts and get tipsy and yeah, life is great.

James T. Kirk does not need a family.

He has a starship.

The Enterprise is a thing of beauty. Clean. Sterile, almost. White and proud and gleaming. James is in love before he knows it, and it's wonderful, because this ship - his ship – this lady won't ever betray him. She's loyal and sturdy and _his_, and Jim wouldn't give her up

_"Hang on, Cap'n, we'll get you out of there."_

_Jim thinks he'd believe Scotty, except that Scotty is not the one who's dazed and concussed and buried under several tons of wall and floor and sharp and bloody metal._

_"Hurry," Jim says, and gasps. The long, thin pole that's sticking through his stomach moves around when he tries to talk, and it hurts like a bitch._

_"I've got you, sir, we've got you, we just need to get a bit o' rubble out of the way first and we'll have you out in a jiffy," Scotty continues cheerfully as if he didn't hear a thing, as if Jim couldn't hear his barks to find the scanner and get Dr. McCoy here now! and move the fuck out of the way unless you want to kill the captain, sonny._

_"Just hold on a little longer, Captain," Scotty says, and Jim thinks he would laugh if he could breathe well enough to, because Scotty's being absolutely ridiculous, but Jim's got no choice but to follow his orders, and maybe this is what the whole crew feels like when Jim's in charge, huh? And maybe it would be better if Scotty didn't get him out in time and they had someone with a grain of sense and an ounce of ethics come and tell them what to do instead of him._

_But Scotty says 'hold on' again, and Jim settles in and waits._

if he had to rip off his own arm and face down an army of Klingons to keep her safe and sound. She's a good ship, does well even when Scotty overloads the engine and when Spock reprograms the computers 'for efficiency' and when Chekov and Sulu fly her a little too close to a hurtling asteroid for her own good. Jim is quite content with her performance,

_The gym is dark at three in the morning, lights dimmed and quiet, the skeleton crew of a night shift too busy to train and everybody else too asleep to consider it. 'James Tiberius Kirk,' Jim says, rolls it off his lips like the mockery it is, and he hits the punching bag too hard and too fast and doesn't stop, because Ensign Mallory's face is still fresh in his mind and he knows that if he doesn't hit the bag he'll hit the wall instead, or someone else, and he is tired and exhausted and has seen more than enough blood for one day._

_"You could not have saved her," Spock says some time later, when Jim is hunched against the wall and breathing hard and Spock decides to stop eavesdropping and walk inside. "There is no way in which you could have rescued Ensign Mallory once she was captured."_

_"She shouldn't have been there in the first place." Jim lets the back of his head hit the wall with a loud thump and lets his hands drop to his sides._

_"No." Spock steps over and sits down next to him, all ease and grace and catlike quiet as he simply folds down and lets himself descend to the floor. "It was unnecessary. But once she was a hostage, any attempt to rescue her would no doubt have allowed her kidnappers to infiltrate the Enterprise and gain access to our control codes."_

_"Well, fuck the Enterprise," Jim says, and he wonders that there's not more fire and less weariness in his voice, because when did he grow old and tired and – oh, yeah, and then he remembers how Ensign Mallory's stomach had looked with half her intestines out of it and how her hands had clawed at him because she somehow wasn't dead yet and how she'd cried and asked for her mother and father to help her when he rested her head up on his thigh and told her she'd be fine, and he remembers and he feels ancient. "They can have it, Spock, they could have had it if they'd let her-"_

_"And if they had infiltrated the Enterprise and gained use of the computer, they would no doubt have killed every officer on board, including myself and Lieutenants Uhura and Sulu."_

_"I hate you," Jim says, and his voice is old and tired and weary like the rest of him, and Spock doesn't get up or walk out or believe him in the slightest, and they sit, alone, together in the still and quiet darkness as the hours pass them by._

and, if all goes according to plan, Jim will be sitting in this captain's chair, on this heavenly beautiful wonderful ship, until the Federation drags him out of it kicking and screaming and not a moment sooner.

Except that even if he loses his name and his rank and his reputation and his ship, he'll have enough, because there's more to life than that, there's family, and he'll make it through all right even if he hasn't got one.

Because Jim Kirk doesn't need a family.

He's got a fucking crew.


End file.
